SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Every day, it seems AI makes it harder to believe what you see online. AI is making Spencer Buell's job harder too. He's a reporter for The Boston Globe who covers the nearby cities of Cambridge and Somerville. Cambridge is home to Harvard and Brahman splendor (ph). Somerville is - well, let him tell us.
SPENCER BUELL: It's the densest city by population in the state. It's also full of a lot of really interesting, strange, unusual, quirky people. It has a bit of a college town vibe. So it's the kind of place where it would not be completely out of the ordinary for someone to, for example, be clearing their driveway of snow while riding a unicycle.
SIMON: Clearing their driveway of snow while riding a unicycle? Well, Buell was on the community Facebook page this week when he saw the video...
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SIMON: ...Set to some dance music, a convoy of unicyclists - three of them - out in what looked like a local neighborhood, shoveling snow. One of them wore a jester's hack.
BUELL: And I flagged this to an editor, and I was like, hey, this is fun. And he immediately said, but is it AI? And I didn't know.
SIMON: The more Spencer Buell looked at the video, the more skeptical he became.
BUELL: Well, we started showing it to people in the newsroom and saying, well, what do you think about this? I mean, does this look real to you or doesn't it? And some people said, yeah, that's obviously AI. And some people were kind of on the fence. We put it into an AI detection service, and it gave us this report that there was a 51% chance that it was AI. So it was basically a coin flip.
SIMON: And so Buell decided to go back to the source, the community Facebook page where he'd first seen the video. He contacted the person who posted it, Alex Feldman.
ALEX FELDMAN: He sent this short text saying, we're not sure if this is real or AI. I just said, well, if you just showed up here, you could see if someone can ride a unicycle in the snow and shovel.
SIMON: How could any reporter worth his rock salt turn that down?
FELDMAN: It's almost like a dare, and he showed up, like, less than an hour later.
SIMON: Now, Alex Feldman goes by Alex the Jester. He's a comedian. He's been riding around Somerville on a unicycle for years.
FELDMAN: Yeah. I remember pushing our boys in a specially made stroller just for that.
SIMON: So when the Boston Globe reporter showed up at his house, Feldman hopped up on his unicycle and shoveled for him. No problem.
FELDMAN: The snow makes it a little bit trickier, of course, but it's manageable if you've been doing it, you know, all these years. By the way, a couple of my neighbors looked at me just for a few seconds, smiled, and just went right back to business 'cause they're like, oh, there he goes again.
SIMON: And the other two unicyclists are the sons of Alex the Jester. They have long outgrown the stroller, and, of course, they can pedal and shovel at the same time. The video wasn't too good to be true. So that's how Spencer Buell confirmed the veracity of the video. But he says this experience offers a valuable reminder.
BUELL: You know, a lot of things that go around, there's immediate skepticism that what you're seeing is real or isn't real, and there should be, because people are making policy decisions. They're forming their own opinions about events that transpired and whether they should or shouldn't have happened the way that they did or who's culpable and who isn't. A lot of these things are based on video evidence, and video evidence just is not what it used to be, unfortunately, right now. We need to be a lot more careful, and we need to be double-, triple-, quadruple-checking that what we're seeing is real.
SIMON: And there won't always be a snow-shoveling jester on a unicycle to help us figure it out.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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